Jesus Chávez, who had sought to be renamed principal at any high school, made few comments after the board's vote, saying, "I just need to step away from it right now."

He then walked through a side door in the boardroom with his wife, Jeannie Meza-Chávez, the district's director of secondary personnel and recruiting.

Board President Isela Castañon-Williams declined to comment on the decision because it was related to personnel matters.

The board voted to deny the appeal without deliberation.

Before the hearing, two current Bowie High teachers and a former teacher spoke against Chávez's return to the South El Paso high school, which has been at the center of a scheme to rig federal and state accountability measures by pushing limited English-speaking students out of the classroom and reclassifying others in the wrong grade.

"Teachers were told to ignore the district attendance policy and not to count students absent even if they walked into the classroom one minute before the end of class," said Robert Bellows, a world geography teacher at Bowie High. "Another common theme of the monthly faculty meetings was suggestions and rationale to inflate grades."

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As Bellows spoke, supporters of Chávez in the audience shouted "Sit down" and "You're a teacher?" which prompted the district's attorney to urge the board president enforce meeting decorum.

Current and former teachers have accused Chávez of playing a part in reclassifying grades and grade levels of limited-English proficient students so they avoided taking the 10th-grade state-mandated exams, which are used to determine federal accountability ratings.

Reporter Hayley Kappes

During a news conference in April, former interim Superintendent Terri Jordan announced she had temporarily reassigned Chávez to a central office job because he admitted in an interview with internal auditors to intentionally violating district policy on counting out-of-country credits for transfer students from Mexico.

Chávez was quoted in an audit as saying sometimes "we have to compromise the policy, sometimes difficult and ugly scenarios we have here and we have to violate policy."

Paul Escobar, Chávez's attorney, told the board that Jordan's public announcement about the reassignment of Chávez was a retaliatory move because he was cooperating with federal and state investigators.

Having a news conference to announce the reassignment of a principal is unprecedented, Escobar said.

"In a situation like this, a majority of the time when questions arise of a reassignment, the standard response is this is a personnel matter that can't be discussed," Escobar said. "Why was Dr. Chávez's reassignment treated differently? What was the motivation to make this reassignment so public? His cooperation with federal and state agencies did not sit well with some."

Escobar added that "it's been unclear to everyone" why Chávez was reassigned more than 20 months after he received a letter of reprimand for internal audit findings that showed some student's grades were changed, other students took the wrong state-mandated test and others were improperly skipped from ninth to 11th grade without explanation.

Jordan has never explained why she reassigned Chávez nearly two years after he received the written reprimands.

In a July interview with the El Paso Times, Chávez said that when he received his letters of reprimand in September 2010 from James Anderson, assistant superintendent of secondary schools, former Superintendent Lorenzo García and Jordan, who was then-chief of staff, were in the room.

The district's internal auditor, Joe Yañez, had sent a copy of a May 2011 audit report to Jordan showing evidence of dozens of student transcripts that had tampered grades or grade levels.

Jordan also was forwarded several emails from former Pupil Services Director Mark Mendoza that raised questions about wrongdoing at Bowie.

The investigation into cheating at Bowie led to the conviction of García, who was sentenced last week to 3åyears in prison.

He pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and for steering a no-bid $450,000 contract to his mistress.

Jordan's news conference in which she announced the Bowie principal's reassignment came hours after the district released about 1,500 documents to the El Paso Times through a public information request that sought the same records the district provided in response to the U.S. Department of Education's audit.

The documents show Jordan, as chief of staff, compiled the records for the federal audit in late 2010 through the spring of 2011.

But the district's lawyer, Anthony Safi, on Tuesday told the board that the first time Jordan saw those documents was in April.

Safi said a hearing officer determined that Chávez was reassigned for a separate matter than what he was reprimanded for in 2010.

"Those same materials prompted the press conference," Safi said. "It was not called simply to announce the reassignment. It was called in response to what the interim superintendent saw as very serious and significant issues raised by these documents she was seeing for the first time."

Hayley Kappes may be reached at hkappes@elpasotimes.com; 546-6168. Times reporter Zahira Torres contributed to this story.

In other actionEl Paso Independent School District trustees unanimously approved the following:

Awarding a $24,650 contract to consulting firm PROACT Search to conduct the district's search for a superintendent.

Supported the administration's job description for an in-house attorney and for the position to be advertised.